Dutch Impressions: Snack Counter Culture
Like every other country in this beautiful world, the Dutch have their own set of snack food delicacies. The snack culture for many years used to be simple: the typical Dutch family would cook and eat their rather bland dinner five days a week. The other two days the Dutch nuclear family got take out food: one day would be Chinese food and the other day they’d get their real snack fetish on, fried potatoes. Let’s have a look at this last event.
These potatoes would be like french fries but twice as thick and four times as greasy. And in avoidance of a one-sided meal, some form of meatstuffs would be added, I’ll try and describe that later on.
Remember the Pulp Fiction movie? The dialogue between the Travolta and Jackson characters about the Dutch and french fries
? The Travolta character explains that the Dutch don’t eat their fries with ketchup, they prefer mayonnaise. This is all true, but there’s more to it that just mayonnaise.
The typical Dutch snack counter sells a whole range of toppings for your fries. Mayo, ketchup, satay sauce, the weird sauce the Germans like to put on their sausages (keep it clean..), called Curry and the mixes..
Ordering a Patatje Speciaal or Fries with Special Toppings would get you mayo, ketchup and diced onions. A Patatje Oorlog or Fries At War? That’s mayo, satay sauce, hold the onions.
Sidestep to the satay sauce. The island group of Indonesia used to be a colony of the Dutch and this added something to the culinary experience of the Dutch back then and it still does. It added a sense of taste, because most Dutch food will make the world’s most boring person seem interesting. One of the products the Indonesian cuisine brought to this country was satay sauce. Now go google all the differrent versions of satay sauce recepies and just accept that the Dutch idea of satay sauce was based on peanut butter. That’s why satay sauce is also know here as peanut sauce. And now, imagine some french fries with mayo and thick peanut sauce. Back to the story..
So now we have an idea of what the Dutch put on their fries. What kind of meatstuffs usually accompanies the fries? Hmm.. The Lost-in-Translation effect is gonna hurt this part of this writing, so bear with me.
We got frikandel, kroket, bamihapje, nasihapje, halve kip, bereklaauw, mexicano, the list is endless and endlessy gross. Everything’s deep fried in enough oil to make the OPEC guys a bit nervous. And I used to be a big fan of the stuff.. Heheh..
A frikandel is the ultimate pseudo-proto-sausage consisting of the original Mystery Meat. In this case it’s also a mystery best kept unsolved because you just do not want to know what they’re putting into that thing. The kroket is harder to explain, I’ll check if there’s any.. Yep, found it, have a read here. The bami hapje and the nasi hapje are variants on the kroket, the fillings are different and suggest an oriental flavor, while just as the kroket, the deep frying process takes away any flavor from the product. That’s why people often eat these two snacks with some sambal.
Sidestep to the sambal. The second great food enrichment achievement for the Dutch was sambal, also from Indonesia, a spicy hot sauce made of chili peppers from Hell. The sambal is also used and prepared in Suriname, the second Lost Colony of the Dutch. Back to the meatstuffs..
Can you imagine? One day in the week the nuclear Dutch family wouldn’t cook the bland and boring stuff, they’d go the the snack counter and go get the fries and meatstuffs with all the delicious toppings!! Interesting combo: a Patatje Oorlog with a Frikandel Speciaal and some extra sambal..
Oh, and the snack counter? They sell much more than just the aforementioned gastronomical wonders. They got hamburger-like thingies, with crap quality buns. A typical Dutch delicacy is the Broodje Bal, that’s a round ball of hamburger meat the size of a small country that’s been sucking up oil for hours and served with again those crap quality buns.
If you think I’m too hard on this cuisine, remember, I ate most of this stuff during my teens and my student days. Somehow, I just got fed up with it and switched to many other unhealthy alternatives, because the Dutch snack culture’s expanded to a large range of non-Dutch varieties. But that’s another story..
For a fact: the best fries in Europe are those incredible Belgian fries, ask any Dutch person and you’ll get a very short and irritated confirmation 
